How Wood Wiz works

The total price the vendor charges divided by the total weight of the product. For a R 2,050 listing of 1,000 split pieces with an estimated weight of 1,500 kg, that's R 1.37/kg.

Most vendors state the bag weight directly (e.g. “18kg bag”) or the pallet count (e.g. “1700 x 20kg”). When they don't, we estimate — see “~est” below.

The vendor didn't state the weight, so we estimated it. Two cases:

• Piece count — we assume ~1.5 kg per split piece. A “1,000 piece” bundle becomes 1,500 kg.
• Volume — for “0.5 m³” or “50L” listings, we multiply by the species' air-dry density.

Estimated weights are reasonable averages but not vendor-stated. Confirm at checkout if the exact kilogram matters.

The vendor's storefront reports a regular price higher than what they're currently charging. We show the strike-through and label it Sale. We don't verify whether it's a real time-limited discount or a permanent markdown.

Most vendors price delivery by suburb, with multiple tiers, and confirm the final charge at checkout. Folding that into a single per-kg number would require assumptions we can't back. Each vendor card surfaces their stated delivery rule (free over R X, flat fee, zoned, etc.) so you can factor it in yourself.

Use the Budget (total) filter in the sidebar. Tap one of the preset chips (< R 500, R 500–1k, R 1k–3k, R 3k–7k, R 7k+) for a quick pick, or type custom Min/Max values for full control. Leave the sort on Cheapest per kg first — the list now shows the best-value-per-kg options that fit your budget at the top.

For a budget of R 2,000, picking the R 1k–3k preset gives you every product in that range, ranked by which one stretches your rand the furthest. Products with delivery-zone variants are included if the cheapest variant fits the budget.

The Bulk dropdown lets you set a minimum weight: 100 kg+, 500 kg+, 1 ton+, or 2 tons+. Pick whichever matches your buying scale — a homeowner stocking up for winter usually wants 500 kg+ or 1 ton+; a restaurant or oven-owner might want 2 tons+.

Below 100 kg you're mostly looking at retail bag quantities, which is what you see when the dropdown is set to Any size.

Some vendors list one product with a separate price per delivery zone (West Coast vs Boland vs Cape Town, for example). For these, we show the full price range — e.g. R 5,497–R 6,325 and R 1.22–R 1.40 /kg — so you can see the cheapest and most expensive options at a glance.

Sorting is always done by the cheapest price in the range, so products are ranked by what you'd pay if you happened to be in the cheapest zone. Visit the vendor's page (linked from each row) to pick your actual zone and confirm the exact figure.

When a variable product's variants all happen to be the same price (no zone variance), you'll just see a single number.

An automated job scrapes each vendor's public product catalogue daily. We currently cover 10 vendors across 2 cities:

A vendor delivering to more than one city is listed under each. Prices are always compared within a city — each page ranks the vendors who deliver to that doorstep against one another, never one city against another. Cape Town bulk wood is cheaper than Gauteng's largely because it is nearer the source, which tells you nothing useful if you live in Johannesburg.

We're not affiliated with any of them. There's no paid placement or ranking adjustment — vendors are ordered purely by the metric you chose (price per kg by default).

Refreshed every 24 hours. The time of the last refresh is shown in the header of the Prices and Vendors pages — as “Data refreshed 6 hours ago” once the page is open in your browser, and hover it for the exact timestamp. If you need real-time accuracy — before placing a large order, say — click through to the vendor's page to confirm.

By median price per kg, not the mean. A vendor that sells both bulk hardwood pallets (R 2–5/kg) and small specialty smoking-wood boxes (R 100+/kg) would look misleadingly expensive on the mean, because the specialty items skew the average upward. The median shows the typical price you'd pay for a representative product in their catalogue. The breakdown card also shows their cheapest-per-kg if you specifically want the floor.

A median is only as good as the catalogue behind it, so the “Cheapest typical price” card at the top of the page passes over vendors with fewer than 8 listed products and gives it to the cheapest vendor above that line. Every vendor still appears in the charts and breakdown cards either way, with their product count next to the bar so you can weigh it yourself.

Only Mother City Firewood and Lancehoudt explicitly state in their delivery descriptions that wood is stacked on arrival (instead of dumped on the driveway). They each get a “Stacking included” badge on the Vendors page. The other six vendors don't say one way or the other — we don't display a badge for them rather than guessing. If stacking matters to you, ask at checkout.

We can only include vendors with a public, machine-readable product catalogue (most use Shopify, WooCommerce, or have a sitemap we can parse). Adding a new vendor requires writing a small scraper for their site format. It is also why some cities aren't listed at all: Durban and the Garden Route have firewood sellers, but as of September 2026 none of them publishes a catalogue we can read, and a city page with one vendor on it wouldn't be a comparison. Suggest one via the GitHub issue tracker.

Best-effort. We pull directly from each vendor's public storefront, so the numbers reflect what the vendor advertises at scrape time. Vendor prices can change between scrapes, and we occasionally hit edge cases where a vendor's API reports prices differently than what their site displays — we fix these as we find them. Always confirm at checkout for any sizeable order.

Yes — the full source lives at github.com/ces0491/wood-wiz. Bug reports, vendor suggestions, and scraper improvements welcome via the issue tracker.

Wood Wiz is built and maintained by Cesaire Tobias (@ces0491). I'm a Cape Town-based braai lover who burns a lot of wood but can never reliably determine which vendor offers the best value. Whether it's summer time braais or winter fires, every time I restock I ask: Should I buy bags or bakkie loads? Do I only want Rooikrans or a combo? Do I really need R5000 worth of wood even though the per kilo price is great? The site simplifies the process of comparing wood prices across vendors, types and quantities.

Wood Wiz is independent — there are no affiliate links, no paid placement, and no vendor-sponsored ranking. Vendors are listed because they have a public product catalogue and serve the cities we cover; rankings are purely metric-based.

No. We have no commercial relationship with any of the listed vendors. We scrape their public product pages once a day; we don't get a cut of anything you buy, and the “Buy at vendor” links go straight to the vendor's own site without tracking redirects.

All correspondence routes through GitHub issues at github.com/ces0491/wood-wiz/issues. That includes bug reports, vendor corrections (your prices look wrong, your bags are heavier than we estimated, etc.), suggestions for new vendors, and opt-out requests if you're a vendor and would prefer not to be listed.

Open a GitHub issue with the product or pricing you want corrected, or a request to be removed from the comparison entirely. We'll act within a few days. If your storefront changes and the scraper breaks, we'll usually notice within 24 hours via the daily sanity checks; otherwise let us know.